Summer is right around the corner - what will you be reading?

By Doug Moe
Many years ago, a major magazine – it may have been Esquire – had a cover photograph of a monkey sitting at a typewriter beside a backyard swimming pool that appeared to be in Beverly Hills.
The cover copy read, “Is Anyone in America Not Writing a Screenplay?” The implication was clear: Who wouldn’t want to write for the movies?
Once upon a time, Dennis Palumbo not only wanted to be a screenwriter, he was among the fortunate few to actually become one. He wrote for television and then got a credit for the outstanding Peter O’Toole film comedy, “My Favorite Year.”
Palumbo also – like many Hollywood creative types – eventually found himself in therapy. That’s where this story takes a turn.

"I went into therapy and fell in love with the process,” Palumbo said recently, by phone from southern California.
Palumbo went back to school, and became a licensed psychotherapist, specializing in patients with creative concerns. He also continued writing – his advice column in the monthly journal of the Writers Guild of America, West was enormously popular.
A half dozen years ago, Palumbo detoured again, this time into crime fiction. His 2010 novel, Mirror Image, introduced Daniel Rinaldi, a Pittsburgh psychologist who consults with that city’s police department and consequently finds himself involved in all manner of mayhem. There are now four titles in the Rinaldi series, with the most recent, “Phantom Limb,” having been published last fall.
Palumbo’s varied career path has among other things made him savvy in the ways of publicity, and when he got in touch with Mystery to Me, volunteering to be interviewed for the newsletter, I jumped at the chance.
“My Favorite Year” is one of my favorite movies. There’s a scene in which the Peter O’Toole character, a swashbuckling actor named Alan Swann, finds himself hanging by his fingertips from the balcony of a swank apartment.
Two self-important party-goers are on the balcony, and one says, “I think Alan Swann is beneath us.” The other replies, “Of course he’s beneath us. He’s an actor.”
It’s one of my favorite lines in all the movies. I repeated it to Palumbo, who humbly said it was not among his contributions to the film. It was refreshing to find not a trace of high self-regard in Palumbo’s discussion of his Hollywood years. But then, he also wrote for “The Love Boat.
Palumbo is originally from Pittsburgh – the setting for his Rinaldi mysteries – and attended the University of Pittsburgh, thinking he would be an engineer. A stint on the school paper led to a writing degree and a job in advertising. One day Palumbo looked around and realized that what all his colleagues really wanted to do – like the monkey on the Esquire cover – was write movie scripts.
Unlike most, Palumbo decided to give it a real shot, moving to Los Angeles in 1975. His scripts went nowhere, but he had success writing jokes for comedians, including Gabe Kaplan and Garry Shandling. (When we spoke, Palumbo was still expressing shock over Shandling’s recent death, and planning to go to the memorial service in a few days.)
His association with Kaplan led to a staff writing job on “Welcome Back, Kotter,” and that in turn opened more doors. Before too long, the allure of the entertainment industry faded. As someone once said, behind all that phony tinsel is real tinsel. Or as Palumbo told the Los Angeles Times, of his decision to begin volunteering with schizophrenics at a private psychiatric hospital, “I’d had great training because I had worked with studio executives.”
The critically acclaimed Rinaldi series draws on Palumbo’s Pittsburgh upbringing and his later work in psychotherapy. The character resembles his creator: Italian-American, Pittsburgh-bred, a fan of jazz and the Steelers. One difference: more dead bodies show up in Rinaldi’s world.
Palumbo describes his writing process as finding his way as he goes. He eschews outlines. “I don’t know who the villain is,” he said. “I just start with a vision in my head.” It can lead to false turns in his first drafts.
“But sometimes,” Palumbo notes, “a false turn is where interesting things happen.
He gets back to Pittsburgh about once a year, he said, and finds the former industrial city profoundly changed since his youth. It’s about high tech and world-class medicine now. He needs to pay attention. His readers let him know if, for instance, he has a one-way street going in the wrong direction.
Palumbo wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s a fifth Rinaldi book in the works, and talk of a possible television series featuring the character. They won’t have to look far for a screenwriter.